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The_Doctor posted:Wait, why hasn't Charles Dance been in Who yet? He and Alan Rickman are having a contest to see how long each can resist their destiny of playing the Master. Luckily for us, while they were spitting on God's beautiful plan, Michelle Gomez slid in and took her rightful place on the throne.
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Apr 10, 2015 09:44
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CobiWann posted:its another Big Finish sale Oh good, here I was in danger of actually seeing a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel and maybe being able to catch up on listening to my prior purchases, and along comes a Big Finish sale to put that idea to rest. Edit: Happy Birthday Peter, I hope nobody tries to kiss you 
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Apr 10, 2015 10:53
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I am a HUGE fan of Robot of Sherwood, it's a tremendously fun episode.cargohills posted:Is the beheading still cut out in the series 8 DVDs? Yes.
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Apr 10, 2015 21:59
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Astroman posted:DId he really though? Like I realize that he's mentioned that before, but was JNT involved in that process or was it all Holmes headcannon or something? All Holmes headcanon, it's basically the same thing as Andrew Cartmel and the Looms stuff - allusions were made to the bigger stories they were looking at telling, but where Cartmel just never got a chance to do it, Holmes "did it" without explicitly coming out and straight up saying this was what was intended, and everybody else after that pretty much ignored the "the Doctor had secret lives before Hartnell" stuff, which is good. Of all the little continuity-nod stuff that was done in the classic show, my favorite remains the introduction during Pertwee's era of the reference to a mentor-figure who gave him guidance on one particularly bad day, who actually shows up later at the end of the Pertwee era to one again provide him moral support. That mentor figure had a very unique method of dealing with his own regeneration, and that actually got subtly referenced 7 years later at the end of the Tom Baker era, with the Doctor/Watcher figures being a more primitive version of the K'anpo/Cho-Je pairing from Planet of the Spiders. it was kind of neat how one group of showrunners messing around with some ideas about Buddhism ended up looping back around to the end of a very different era of the show.
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Apr 11, 2015 11:53
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As much as I dig Alex McQueen, I'm very eager to see more of Michelle Gomez, she was great in the role and her scenes with Capaldi were even better.
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Apr 13, 2015 00:12
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As always, it's very important in any proposed multi-Master story that the Masters attempt to double-cross each other, and super-important that the younger one somehow come out on top much to the surprise and indignation of the older.
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Apr 13, 2015 00:54
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CobiWann posted:I would love to see a Master incarnation with a full-blown companion. Someone who's just twisted enough that the Master considers not killing them once his/her plan is complete. That's right. Considers.
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Apr 13, 2015 03:29
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 Nocturne is a rather odd story, touching in its own way but suffering from a lack of any real standout features. Ostensibly a story about how art and beauty can grow out of horror and despair, it's a story with a surprisingly downbeat and oddly un-Doctor like resolution to the main peril. The supporting characters are mostly one-dimensional (but enjoyable), while a supposed quasi-romantic subplot between Ace and one of them feels detached and not particularly earned, while Hex is his usual pleasant and helpful self but doesn't particularly do anything of any great relevance. Probably the most memorable feature of the story comes from the Doctor's realization that his love of keeping things close to his chest and sniffing out trouble even when he hasn't been actively looking for it has a very real cost, and that his actions are unfair towards his companions. On the colony-world of Nocturne in the city of Glasst, a great Renaissance of art, music, literature, philosophy etc has grown out of a horrible long-running war against an alien race. It is a time and place that the 7th Doctor considers one of his favorites, admitting that the human race has a history of reacting to the horror of war with some great artistic achievements. In Glasst, he is able to surround himself with creators, with people who believe in art and beauty, in peace and cooperation, in the glory of the act of creation. Unfortunately for him, his return coincides with the failure of a grand (and secret) experiment by a young music student, accidentally unleashing a "bioharmonic" creature that is attracted to the act of creation, but brings only death and destruction in its wake - it is by its nature a discordant, destructive thing and - though not intentional, malicious or even technically sapient - it threatens to destroy everything beautiful and good about Glaast, everything that has grown out of the death and destruction of the great war. The Doctor has been to Glaast many times before through his various incarnations, and he has friends there who know him no matter what face he is currently wearing. He introduces Hex and Ace to some of them at a nightclub run by an enthusiastic if utterly awful poet named Ragpole, and rather cheekily convinces them to gatecrash another old friend's house to have an all-night party. The Doctor is almost childishly happy as he gets "the old gang" back together, like that one friend who shows up back in town and convinces everybody to act like they did when they were kids, and soon everybody is gathered at the home of the great composer Korbin Thessenger getting drunk and telling stories. When the lights go out, the Doctor discovers one of the "Familiars" is malfunctioning, not knowing that this is due to it taking part in the failed student - Lomas - experiment and expresses his distaste for the automaton. The Familiars are a constant presence throughout the story, to the point that it seems there MUST be something going on there... and there isn't. The Doctor comments frequently about how you can't trust the robot Familiars, that there is too much scope for things to go wrong. The Familiar in Autonomous mode demonstrates an ability to widely interpret its functions, and at one point in the story the Doctor and Ragpole are menaced by malfunctioning Familiars driven insane by the Bioharmonic Creature which demonstrates they can and will attack human beings given the right circumstances. After the Doctor has all the Familiars shut down to prevent them from being corrupted in a similar fashion during his attempt to lure the Creature into a trap, one still shows up at an inopportune time much to the Doctor's alarm.... and then absolutely nothing happens with them. At all. I guess this was all intended as a red herring and I guess in that case it worked pretty well... but it does mean that almost everything about the Familiars is a complete waste of time that goes nowhere and has no impact on anything. Probably the only really meaningful moment comes when Ace complains grumpily about the fact all the Familiars are designed to look like shapely women because men find it more comfortable to be served by them. The Doctor sends Hex off with painter Lilian Dillane to collect another artist called Moray to join the party, but when they arrive they find Moray murdered and his lodgings set on fire. Despite feeling an overriding sense of horror and panic permeating from the scene, Hex forces himself to overcome it in order to try and save Moray (not knowing he's already dead), a decision that causes him to be arrested by the Overwatch Commander, who assumes he murdered Moray and set the fire to try and cover his tracks. The Commander - Cate Reeney - is a particularly annoying character, perhaps intentionally so (which doesn't make it any better) as she grumpily insists that Hex is guilty, and later does the same with the Doctor. Of course by our nature as listeners we KNOW they are not guilty, but the refusal to see them as anything other than criminals makes her seem petty rather than strong-minded, like she's after a scapegoat rather than an actual guilty party. This isn't helped by first Hex and then even the Doctor timidly sitting by and allowing her to just unload a long list of accusations made up of poorly connected "facts", jump wildly to conclusions and then work herself up to new accusations based on those "truths". This also makes her sudden decision to start assisting the Doctor feel like it comes out of nowhere, and she once again comes across less as a competent and dedicated officer as she does somebody desperately scrabbling to stay on top of things and sweep the messes she has to deal with under the rug. While Hex is first accused of crime and then set to work herding cats when he tries to get the temperamental artists to research the Doctor's suspicions, Ace is busy finding herself being courted by Will Alloran - twin brother of Lomas and one of Thessenger's star pupils - as he shows her the sights, talks about growing up on Nocturne, his brief and disastarous time on the frontlines of the war, and inadvertently reveals that he was the unknowing cause of the death and destruction currently plaguing the city. Ace talks a little about her own brother (I've still not heard The Rapture and as far as I know this is only the second reference in the entire show's history to this previously unknown and never seen again sibling) and flirts back with Will, but while the mild flirting feels rather natural between the two, the two share so little "screen"time that the depth of Ace's so-called feelings for Will later in the story really don't ring true at all (and must drive Hex mad!  ). Ace is almost the victim of the creature herself, and gets sidelined for awhile until the climax where she wakes up and becomes involved in the big showdown, during which she makes some rather bizarre accusations against Thessenger that seem to come out of nowhere. When all is said and done, the Doctor reveals that Thessenger does something truly heartwarming, and that is a pleasant surprise for Ace.... but why? None of her few encounters with Thessenger give her any reason to make the accusations that she does, and nothing about the way he acts gives her any reason to be surprised by what he ends up doing. It seems like an artificial attempt to inject some drama into the story, and it feels unnatural.What also feels unnatural is how the Doctor wraps up the storyline. He comes up with a way to destroy the creature, as well as a way to guide its path into the trap he is setting (involving a hilarious bit with Ragpole's poetry). But when he reveals the plan, Lilian questions the morality of "murdering" a living act of creation and the Doctor explains there is no other way. Perhaps I've allowed some of the more explicit themes of the revival to color my views, but the Doctor not knowing any other way other than murder to deal with a new creation (which didn't ask to be created and is a victim of its own nature) strikes me as wrong, as does the fact he eventually goes through it apparently without a moment's hesitation. Though he does admit that he wishes there could have been a better way, it's a shame that this comes across more as the "safe" philosophical pondering of a man who already did the foul deed before stopping to acknowledge that maybe it wasn't necessarily the "right" thing to do. Similarly, Lilian's own blind and stupid attempts to get in the way of this plan seem to come out of nowhere, and there is something a trifle condescending about the Doctor telling the other artists to "forgive" her for her actions. I said that maybe I'm letting the revival color my thinking about how the Doctor does things, but then again it was the classic series that gave us the "Do I have the right?" agonizing of the 4th Doctor. Nocturne has its heart in the right place, and it delivers a competent enough story. But it fails to really standout in any way, offers some frustrating red-herrings, doesn't develop its supporting characters beyond the flat, broad strokes of their first appearances, and tries to make a romantic subplot with real impact but fails to penetrate anywhere beneath the surface level. The Doctor acts somewhat out of character, though he is saved by the neat moment between he and Ace where he apologizes for the attitude that she and Hex were jokingly mocking to start the story, as well as the rather touching notion of Glaast being a place where he comes to enjoy the company of artists, to drink and laugh and talk philosophy with others, to debate and discuss with no deeper ulterior motive than his love of human creativity. It's just a pity that THIS particular act of creation - the audio itself - can't raise up above the mediocre. But, like Ragpole with his poetry, at least it tried.
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Apr 14, 2015 04:51
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Cleretic posted:My accent is unpopular in every country. You're South African?  Edit: Just to clarify, I actually really like the South African accent, but they seem to get a lot of grief for it for some reason. I blame Lethal Weapon.
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Apr 15, 2015 01:04
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The_Doctor posted:Interesting. Apparently on the Damaged Goods Big Finish adaptation, someone states that they're working for Torchwood. To be fair, it's not like the BBC can stop RTD doing what he wants, mostly because as often noted, he's literally a giant and they're scared of him.
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Apr 15, 2015 13:08
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The_Doctor posted:But he didn't write the Big Finish adaptation...? Well we can only assume that he gave his blessing for them to include a comment on Torchwood. Either that or he wasn't able to catch little Nick Briggs before he grabbed the reference from RTD's mantel and slid safely back to earth down the beanstalk.
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Apr 15, 2015 23:04
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egon_beeblebrox posted:I don't like much of his writing, but RTD seems like the nicest dude. Whenever he'd appear on screen to talk about making the show, he always had a expression on his face like he still couldn't believe he actually got to make Doctor Who for a living. 
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Apr 16, 2015 01:48
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 Renaissance of the Daleks is a story that emerged "from an idea by Christopher H. Bidmead", a former Script Editor of the classic television series. I don't know where his ideas end and the editing takes over, so all I can say is that I really like the general idea of this story, and feel it failure mostly comes about in the execution of that idea. Whether the original idea by Bidmead is what I liked, or if even that was drastically changed, I don't know, but on paper this is a pretty good story that just falls apart in the way it is produced and edited, in the performances and in (which may be Bidmead's fault) the way the story fails to take advantage of its audio nature. Visually this could have been an appealing story, in audio format it requires a lot of exposition/description that grates the narrative to a standstill, and the loose references to continuity and the substandard resolution to the plot really affect things poorly. The Doctor drops Nyssa off in the 14th Century and travels to the 22nd in order to test out a new device that Nyssa has been working on, one enables trans-temporal communication. Unfortunately for Nyssa, it doesn't seem to work particularly well AND the Doctor absentmindedly dropped her off in Rhodes in the 14th Century, just in time for an invasion by the Order of the Knights of Saint John. Unfortunately for the Doctor, he's landed one year AFTER the Dalek Invasion of Earth from the story of the same name.... only the Daleks HAVEN'T invaded, humanity just goes on living the life it always had. The Doctor runs into General Tillington, an American played by William Hope (best known as Lt. Gorman in Aliens) who unsettles him by knowing far too much about him, as well as revealing his group - the awfully named Global Warning - have developed rudimentary time technology of their own, though they can't travel through time, only "see" a rough vision of the future. Tillington knows about the Doctor, he wants access to the TARDIS, and he's also fully aware that there SHOULD have been a Dalek Invasion within the last year - he doesn't know why it didn't happen but he intends to make sure it continues not to happen, and he correctly suspects the Doctor will want to set things "right" and restore history to its right course. Drugging the Doctor, he puts him into a cell when he refuses to give him access to the TARDIS, only for his slightly goofy nephew (Wilton) to break the Doctor out in order to hitch a ride himself and see all of time and space. What follows has an air of Keys of Marinus/The Key to Time in that there is an overriding goal of tracking down the source of the divergence in the timeline, interspersed with stops in different times/places. Nyssa and a knight (Mulberry) in Rhodes fall through a portal into 19th Century America, smackdab in the middle of the Civil War. Reunited with the Doctor and Wilton, they take on a black Confederate called Floyd and move on to Vietnam in the 20th Century, where they rescue a downed helicopter pilot called Alice before finally finding the location of the timeline divergence and dealing with the problem head-on. This gives the story a very episodic feel, but there is nothing distinct about any of the locations/times, or rather nothing in the story that takes advantage of what would be distinct about them. Rhodes after being conquered by the Knights of Saint John, the American Civil War, the Vietnam War - all interesting settings for stories that end up being little more than set dressing as the actors rush through them to get back to the TARDIS and move on to their next story. Where the previous two mentioned stories from the classic series worked was that each individual setting felt alive, it was a place where things were happening, the Doctor/Companions walked into those worlds and occupied them for a time, taking part in events/making a difference before moving on to their own overall goal. Here, the locations/times would be interchangeable with any other, you might as well say they were in Gorgplex IV in the 53rd Century during the Skalvonia Revolution for all the impact the actual settings have on anything taking place in the episodes. In Rhodes Nyssa is upset about the behavior of the knights, accuses Mulberry of being a creep and then they fall through a wormhole and end up in the Civil War. During the Civil War, Nyssa, Mulberry and Floyd are almost killed in a giant explosion when the TARDIS gets confused by the identical place names in different States. In Vietnam, they rush to rescue Alice from her downed chopper and then.... leave. On the CD Extras for this story, Nick Briggs talks to William Hope about how Big Finish often gets mocked regarding the American accents in their audios, and how this can't happen this time because they got an American to play Tillington (Hope then informs him he is a Canadian based in England!). The trouble is... the accents are still awful! Whether this is down to writing, performance, direction or a mixture of all of them I don't know, but the accents are truly terrible in this story and very much sound like British people trying to do their best impersonation of their broad idea of what an American sounds like. Alice and Floyd in particular are very bad, though at least with Floyd's character the idea seems to be to try and capture the sense of an intelligent man who, through no fault of his own, was poorly educated and is used to having his opinions ignored. Alice is just loud and abrasive where I feel they wanted her to be forthright and self-confident, and she in particular suffers from the issue where too much exposition replaces a script that adequately conveys action through sound. Mulberry is almost a complete non-entity, which makes his pivotal role in the climax of the story fall a little flat. Similarly, Wilton seems pleasant enough but utterly irrelevant, and though he attempts to offer helpful advice to the Doctor and is far too handy with the TARDIS controls, he's otherwise completely forgettable... which makes what happens to him at the end of the story feel oddly appropriate. The story has Daleks in the title, but for most of the first couple of episodes they're relatively absent. Disturbingly, despite the invasion never taking place, some Dalek toys have started to be mass produced with seemingly no point of origin, with the Doctor pondering whether awareness of them is seeping into the subconscious of humanity who KNOW that the timeline they are living in is wrong. The toy Daleks are more than they seem, leading to a rather comedic segment where the Doctor and his companions chase a tiny little Dalek through the corridors of the TARDIS, and later haul one off the TARDIS console while it squeals angrily, like the world's deadliest toddler throwing an adorable little tantrum. The TARDIS is locked into flight "sideways" through Time, eventually ending up in the place where all the "time tracks" converge, some kind of causal nexus in time/space from which all time branches out throughout the vortex. This is the location of mysterious voices that all the characters have been able to hear throughout the story, which were the inspiration for Nyssa to create her device for communicating across time. Unfortunately for them, the inhabitants of this place, for all their talk of peace, justice, liberty etc, turn out to be Daleks. Millions and millions of Daleks, stacked up to form a literal Dalek City, they have made their base in this causal nexus and are attempting to spread out Dalek ideals across time and space (how this is expressed as justice/liberty etc I do not know) - they are aware they were supposed to invade Earth in the 22nd Century, and also aware that thanks to the Doctor their invasion ultimately failed, and they mean to set all this to rights. They have created the toy Daleks, and mean to send trillions of "nano-Daleks" to occupy them, to hit Earth with a surprise attack from within, and because they're insane little megalomaniacs, they've also decided to make the Doctor the trigger for this invasion, as punishment for his foiling their plan in his past. The above paragraph is a whole lot of nonsense and this is how it comes across while listening to it too. The Dalek plan is lunacy, the germ of an interesting idea executing in an astonishingly silly way. While the Doctor, Nyssa and Wilton are escorted through the Dalek City and informed of this needlessly complicated plan, Alice, Mulberry and Floyd try to figure out a course of action to rescue them with the TARDIS by listening to the Doctor singing songs through Nyssa's communication device.... which is also able to be picked up by General Tillington in the 22nd Century, which allows the Doctor to eventually execute a plan to shortcircuit the Dalek control of the TARDIS. In the midst of all this is a creature called the Greylish, which is bizarrely introduced as the cliffhanger to episode 3. "I am.... THE GREYLISH!" it smugly informs, and the howl screeches and the music kicks in while the listener is left going,"Oh no NOT the Greylish.... wait, who the gently caress is the Greylish?" Who the gently caress the Greylish is gets revealed in episode 4, the Doctor having figured it out almost immediately and having to inform the Greylish of the truth of the matter too. Again there is the germ of an interesting idea there, but the Greylish is introduced so late and does so little that its pivotal role in ending the Dalek threat to time/space doesn't really have any impact, similarly to how Mulberry's big moment in the sun falls flat. Suffice to say the Dalek threat is ended, and as a result some stuff happens that feels a little too neat - Wilton ceases to exist, as does Tillington and his time project for the US Military, since now the Dalek Invasion DID happen as it was "meant" to. The Doctor returns the others to their appropriate times with a comment that Alice will probably give him an earful about it, which further leads me to believe that she was intended as a Tegan-esque "mouthy" character, and cements the truth that it is the actor that makes the material and not necessarily the other way around (see L.A Takedown and Heat), because where Tegan amuses, Alice just grates. Renaissance of the Daleks had a lot of potential, but almost none of it was realized. Whatever Bidmead's original idea was, I have to imagine trying to work with that rather than changing it up to the point it no longer reflected his vision would have been a better way to go - at least then if it had been a failure it would have been one that could have been dumped on his doorstep. Who knows how many people were involved in rewrites/edits etc, but it may have been a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth, or a writing by committee job that sucked the soul out of a novel concept. In any case, as an audio this might have made an interesting novel, this format certainly didn't suit the story the way it was told.
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Apr 16, 2015 06:40
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CobiWann posted:The concept of tiny Daleks sound funny, though! At one point they're chasing one around and the Doctor realizes that it wants them to chase it, so they stop, turn around and walk the other way and the little Dalek gets all confused and upset because they're not following the plan and starts yelling at them to come back CobiWann posted:Ten years ago a certain Scottish bloke was announced as the Doctor... The dude from Casanova? Is the Doctor gonna start making out with his companions or something? :lau.... oh wait. v  v
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Apr 16, 2015 12:34
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Astroman posted:I'm in the middle of Worldwide Web, a 2009 audio which takes place in the Near Future of 2015, where a space probe is lost on a mission to Mercury. Well there's a simple explanation for this, NASA is just putting all their funding into making sure Doctor Who is an accurate representation of the future. To be fair, I can't think of a better use for their time, effort and money.
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Apr 17, 2015 04:43
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Wolfechu posted:Has anyone mentioned these fan-made covers in the style of the old Target Novelizations? Because they're amazing. Some of the quotes on the back are a little cringeworthy, but otherwise these are a ton of fun
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Apr 17, 2015 14:28
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The_Doctor posted:To be fair, it's not a suit. Is that from that new Alias series that's gonna be on Netflix? I am really excited about that if it's going to be anywhere near as good as the comic it is based on.
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Apr 18, 2015 00:20
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 I.D is 3/4s of an interesting story that doesn't get any time to breath, rushing to a conclusion before it's due, an uncomfortable hybrid between the single episode format of the revival and the traditional multi-episode format of the Classic Series (to be fair, the Classic series experimented with numbers of episodes per serial as well, particularly towards the end). The story kind of comes to a halt and a particularly unsatisfying resolution, not helped by the fact that a fourth episode IS included, but as a single standalone and entirely unrelated story - I had assumed the fourth part would be some kind of epilogue/follow-up to the first three episodes that would actually tie up the unresolved issues in them... instead it was a (quite good!) one-off that had nothing to do with the main story. The Sixth Doctor is traveling alone, which I guess places this story sometime in the vaguely defined period between Trial of a Timelord and Time and the Rani, between the Doctor dropping off Mel so he could go off and eventually meet her for the "first" time, and she could wait around for his timeline to catch up to hers. He finds himself on a planet (or planetoid) used as a vast dumping ground for computer technology, which has attracted an industry of data pirates hunting for useable/saleable technology - scrap, software, and most valuable of all, memories. In the 32nd Century, humans have developed methods for recording/altering/inserting/dumping/backing-up memories, emotions, personalities etc, and an industry has grown out of trade for these "products". People freely have "personality surgery" to make them more efficient at their work, more valuable as employable commodities, less concerned with things like "conscience" that get in the way of their efforts to clamber to the top of the heap. It is a cynical, depressing, selfish time for the human race, and the Doctor runs smack-dab into the middle of it as he is immediately taken hostage by the first two people he meets, who attempt to ransom him off to a borderline official "clinic" operating on the dump-planet, believing him to be an employee. Everybody on the planet, from the Data-Pirates to the Clinic employees, are concerned with profit and personal gain. Claudia Bridge is sent from the clinic with a small amount of funds to negotiate the release of the hostage, with strict instructions not to go beyond that figure because the technician they believe has been kidnapped "isn't worth" any more than that. Everything is a cost/benefit analysis, and Bridge has had personality surgery that has removed her conscience so that decisions like this won't bother her or - more importantly - get in the way of her advancement up the ranks. When she discovers the Doctor is the hostage and thus not a clinic employee, she shrugs and walks away without a second thought since he isn't her problem, which leaves him to convince his captors to release him using the logic that he's not worth any money to them and thus not worth keeping around. They keep the equipment they found on him, including the Sonic Screwdriver (this NEVER comes up again, and the Doctor eventually leaves the planet without retrieving them) and he catches up with Bridge, discovering the TARDIS has been grabbed up by other scavengers which leaves him having to beg a ride off of Bridge on her glider. They quickly find the TARDIS, as well as dead bodies, somebody or something has been killing people on a direct path towards the Clinic, and all signs point to the culprits being the robot "Scandroids" whose job is to assist in data collection for the clinic. At least one appears to be running amok, and what's worse the problem seems to be contagious, as every other Scandroid it comes into contact with similarly goes on a killing rampage. At the Clinic, the Chief - Dr Marriott - is attempting to ingratiate himself with a visiting accountant - Ms Tevez - to ensure their funding isn't shut down. The Clinic is barely making a profit as they hunt down memory discs for research into more potentially profitable surgeries, but Marriott came to this planet for a very particular reason which he begrudgingly reveals to Tevez. He believes the research of a controversial figure named Zachary Kindell can be found on the planet, a man who pushed past even their society's dubious ethical boundaries in pursuit of his research - but he was undoubtedly a genius, and Marriott believes that with technology that the late Kindell never had access to, they can pick and choose the best parts of his research and make breakthroughs which will revolutionize the industry and make them huge amounts of profit. Tevez is intrigued and agrees to recommend leaving the clinic open, which is when the Scandroids return and all hell breaks loose. Only the arrival of the Doctor and Bridge saves them from a massacre, and despite Marriott's strenuous objections, the Doctor quickly discovers that he is ultimately responsible for what is going on - the Scandroids haven't run amok, they're following their priority programming put in place by Marriott himself, they have discovered Kindell's research which has triggered a "return to the clinic, pass on encoded message to any other Scandroid you meet, deliver encoded material to any member of Clinic staff, only Director Marriott can decode message" command that cannot be countermanded. The problem is, Kindell's research is boobytrapped, and kills any human being who has it forced onto them, while every other Scandroid is given the imperative to also pass on that information. This story is concerned with ethics, with the single-minded pursuit of a goal at any cost, and how quickly that kind of thinking can escalate to death and destruction. The Scandroids are simply the purest expression of this, they act without conscience or question of their orders, they are simply doing what they are instructed to do no matter what happens. Bridge is halfway there herself, while she is capable of questioning, her objections are usually based purely on how they affect her personally - she is selfish, callous and indifferent to the plight of others beyond her own immediate interests. Marriott is no better than the Data Pirates, just wrapped up in a cloak of respectability by his position within the clinic, his only concern for his own prestige and the profit that comes with it. Tevez comes off as a cold fish, and though she seems as concerned with profit as Marriott, her quick shift to the Doctor's side when things go south show that her primary concern is her own wellbeing - she looks at things clinically, weighs the options, and comes to the conclusion that benefits her. It is only the Doctor who really comes across as any sort of moral person, because he's the only one who is outside of their system. Even the gormless Data Pirate Gabe who is clearly in this "job" only because his mother forced him to is predominantly concerned with making a profit - after his mother is brutally killed by a Scandroid, his first thought isn't for revenge or anything beyond momentary grief, but simply how to turn this to his advantage to make money. His medical "condition" allows him to receive the message from the Scandroids without dying, and he immediately makes a beeline for Marriott and sells the data to him, which kicks off another wave of death and destruction after the Doctor had managed to painstakingly return the Scandroids to normalcy. The story takes an odd turn at this point, as Kindell's research turns out to have been more booby-trapped than believed, and affects Tevez and Marriott in very different ways. Marriott becomes for all intents and purposes the Incredible Hulk, stomping around smashing things and screaming,"KILL SCUM!" over and over and over again. Tevez "dies", her personality completely overwritten by Kindell's who developed a way to transplant not just personality traits, but the entire personality/memory of an individual, overwriting the other, effectively making him immortal... or at least his mind, anyway. Marriott's mutation spreads to the Scandroids, which leads to a rather fun bit where the Doctor turns Kindell's research back on itself and overwrites the "mutant" Scandroids with Kindell's personality, causing the "Kindell-bots" to all gather together and bemoan the unfairness of their fate as the human mind cannot operate properly within the limited parameters of the robot "brain". The Doctor far too quickly figures out how to reverse the process on Marriott and Tevez (who has also become mutated), but only has a back-up of Tevez's personality to use, which causes him to create two Tevez's (including physically), Marriott being lost forever. This is the ultimate end expression of the personality "surgery" so popular in this culture - chop and change and you begin to lose parts of what make you "you", and here Marriott loses everything, while Tevez gets to experience the complete loss and then regaining of her own identity.... and then face up to the fact that another "her" also exists. This comes to a depressing conclusion and the surviving Tevez makes the point to the Doctor there is no way of knowing if she is the original Tevez or not - it's possible she was Marriott, and there is no way she will ever know. The Doctor notes that this is what happens when you play around with identity, and tells her that the only person who can tell her who SHE is.... is herself. The Doctor says his goodbyes, heartened to hear Bridge offer to assist Gabe in tracking down and destroying Kindell's research, thinking it might be a sign that she is redeveloping the conscience she had excised. That seems like he is jumping to the conclusion he'd like rather than the one all the evidence is pointing to, though, Bridge has shown no real capacity for growth throughout the story and her offer feels more like a deliberate attempt to get on somebody's good side so she can make what best advantage she can out of her current situation. This rather rushed feeling ending is why I figured episode 4 would have a time-jump and show the Doctor dealing with the unforeseen consequences of Bridge pulling a Marriott, but instead it moves on to a completely separate one-off story. That story, Urgent Calls is a fun piece about a woman who continually finds herself making or receiving "wrong number" phonecalls to/from the Doctor, discovering she has been "infected" with a virus that causes fortuitous circumstances for the infected, which also allows it to spread out across the world. The Doctor is attempting to track down and wipe out the virus despite its apparent helpful nature, an adventure we only get glimpses of through Lauren's increasingly familiar conversations with him. It ends on a very upbeat note despite the fact she loses all contact with the Doctor, and is a pleasant "after dinner mint" for the main course of the rushed and slightly disappointing main course. I.D is just too rushed, compressing the story into three parts but only pacing the first two like a typical Big Finish story, so that part 3 just kind of ends things at a point where it feels like the action should be ramping up. As a look into ethics, personality and the nature of the individual, it falls short of its lofty goals, particularly since we've later had a far better example of that type of story in the Flesh 2-parter from Season 6 of the Revived television series. The Doctor without a proper regular companion hurts things too, since he doesn't share the same easygoing chemistry he'd have had with Peri, Mel or Evelyn, though this may have been intentional as the Doctor is very much meant to be the outsider in this world. A regular companion may have also crowded the three episode format too much, though in that case I'd say just not to make a three episode story, because it is too long for a short story and too short for a proper length story. I can't argue with the desire to experiment with the format, but I hope that this three episode experiment was a short one nonetheless.
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Apr 20, 2015 00:44
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They certainly got a bit more experimental once they became comfortable with the format, which is to be applauded, but it does make it a bit of a slog to get through some of those early experiments. They also tried a couple of stories that were only 2 parters but about 45 minutes long each, which I recall them doing back during the latter part of the Classic series run too (I didn't like it then either!).
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Apr 20, 2015 03:36
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Creed really is just pretty goddamn awful, whereas at least Dreamtime is just kinda boring with a dollop of rather insensitive cultural appropriation thrown in.
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Apr 20, 2015 09:21
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CobiWann posted:Synopsis – Pier Pressure fails to live up to half its name by neglecting to provide any pressure or tension to its characters or their actions, instead choosing to just sit by the dock of the bay wasting the listener’s time. 2/5 Yeah, this story is really forgettable and inconsistent, and if it wasn't for Max Miller I'd say it had absolutely nothing to recommend it. Even with him, I wouldn't recommend listening to this story unless you just want to be a completionist and listen to EVERYTHING (like me  )
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Apr 21, 2015 22:56
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 Exotron suffers from the same pacing issue that I.D did - it's a three episode story where the first two episodes are paced for a "regular" story, and then the third episode suddenly just wraps everything up. Featuring Peter Davison and Nicola Bryant as the 5th Doctor and Peri (no Erimem) it's still little more than a one-man show as the Doctor accomplishes most everything while Peri just kind of worries a lot while spending all her time with two guest characters, only one of whom actually has anything resembling a character/direction. It's a story about obsession, guilt and responsibility but is thrown entirely off-balance by the last minute arrival of a replacement antagonist who blasts onto the scene chewing the scenery and being aggravatingly smug without having put in any legwork in the previous episodes, then departs just as rapidly without anything but a vague note by the Doctor that he'll "probably" get what is coming to him at some point down the road. The Doctor brings Peri to an alien planet where she actually gets to indulge in her "passion" for botany, a passion referenced but almost never demonstrated on the actual television series. She's excited by the various plants she finds, excitedly explaining them to the Doctor who with great restraint points out that he does know a thing or two about botany himself. Still, this trip is for Peri's benefit, so he puts up with it all, and is reduced to the baggage man as he carries about all her samples as she continues on through sand dunes of this mostly desert planet. As they walk though, she is bemused to hear him complain that he's not a wheelbarrow, only to discover that he didn't say that at all, he thought it - it seems that due to some reason the Doctor can only currently theorize, Peri was able to read his mind.  Yes, I'm sure Peri really has trouble reading men's minds. They encounter a pair of workers on a pylon, but before they can introduce themselves to the jovial, working-class pair, a rumbling warns of an impending attack by the giant hyena-like Farakosh. The female worker is killed and the male pinned beneath the wreckage, and the Farakosh has been knocked momentarily prone, which leaves it defenseless as it is brutally put down by a giant robot called an Exotron, remote-piloted from the workers' base. When the Doctor loudly denounces this as murder, the Exotron reacts unexpectedly by grabbing him up and hauling him away, leaving Peri to try and save the survivor - Shreeni - aided by the unexpected arrival of Paula, head of the Geological Team, who saves them both from being electrocuted by Peri's hasty rescue attempt. From here the story mostly sticks with two separate strands that briefly touch on each other at a couple of points in the narrative. The Doctor is accused by the head of the base - Major Taylor - of being a meddler from "Earth Authority" come to stick his nose into the terraforming project taking place on this planet, and most particularly into the Exotron program. The Doctor eventually figures out that the Exotron's aren't being remote piloted in conventional terms, but are telepathically run by Taylor, who is suffering under the stress of having his mind stretched out across multiple different Exotron units in various different parts of the base and surrounding area. Taylor is also stretched out thin by the guilt of his actions, not least of which is that he has been receiving illicit funding from Secretary for the Interior Ballentyne, bypassing any number of ethical and legal restrictions on his work which Ballentyne intends to sell out to the military at an enormous profit. Taylor's obsession and guilt drive the narrative, he is obsessed with making the Exotron program a success, guilty over his criminal behavior, even guiltier over the gulf it has caused between himself and his ex-wife (Paula) and guiltiest of all over the terrible secret at the core of the Exotron program - a rather disturbing revelation somewhat flattened by the fact it has happened in multiple other Doctor Who stories, both classic, revival (some which hadn't been written at this point, to be fair) AND Big Finish itself. As the Doctor attempts to escape arrest, infiltrate the mysterious telepathic field overriding the entire base, and get through to Taylor the necessity of shutting the Exotron program down, Peri is busy with Paula and Shreeni just trying to survive. The second strand of the story is mostly Paula's, with Peri along for support and Shreeni mostly present to gently caress things up or offer up some comedy. Paula is played by Isla Blair, wife of Julian Glover, and she is absolutely fine in her role, she just doesn't get much to work with. Paula is a no-nonsense women torn between disgust at her ex-husband's actions and guilt at her part in the collapse of their marriage. Headstrong, she refuses Exotron escorts and sneaks out of the base to continue her work unhindered, which has lead her to discover the Farakosh are not hostile unless in the presence of the Exotrons or the relay pylons dotting the desert landscape. With Peri, the two figure out what is causing the Farakosh hostility (the only part of the story were Peri really achieves much of anything, sadly) and comes up with a solution, only to be "saved" by the Exotrons which causes everything to spiral further out of control. The two strands of the story hurriedly combine again here, as the Doctor is able to infiltrate the telepathic field surrounding the base and the Farakosh are finally able to communicate with the humans. With Taylor gaining some perhaps undeserved redemption for his rather horrible actions, Ballentyne shows up as the new central antagonist of the story and completely tilts the story of its axis - despite an earlier appearance he is an "alien" to the narrative so far, and his sudden arrival and gleeful wrecking of the situation and vengeful gloating towards the Doctor feels completely out of place. With another episode to breath this might have been pulled off, but Taylor's defeat/quasi-redemption, Ballentyne's arrival, the eruption of violence, the resolution of that violence, the escape of Ballentyne and the wrapping up of events all happens in the space of a single episode. It's all too much, too fast, and everything feels far too smoothly resolved, with the Doctor and Peri leaving almost as quickly as they arrived after a whirlwind visit of death, destruction and redemption. None of the themes are properly explored, events don't have time to settle in, the seriousness of the situation never gets a chance to sink in for the listener before it is all over. In that respect, Exotron is a disappointment, though not a particularly memorable one. Urban Myths is a one-off that fills up the space of the "missing" episode. Unfortunately unlike Urgent Calls it doesn't quite work, again stuffing too much into a single episode that could have fit far better into a regularly paced episode. Three agents of the CIA (Ugh I hate that "clever" name for the "Celestial Intervention Agency" so much) have come to Earth to execute the Doctor for genocide, a result of his actions on the planet Poytee. As they wait for the Doctor to arrive in a particular restaurant (according to their superiors, an examination of the Doctor's timeline indicated he would be there) they discuss the Doctor's crimes, and all three are surprised to discover they remember his actions in entirely different ways. As they go through each course of their meals, a different Agent tells a different story, with the Doctor and Peri's actions on Poytee becoming less bloodthirsty and more altruistic with each telling. The best part of this story is in getting to hear Davison and Bryant perform their familiar roles in vastly different ways, particularly in the first telling where they are cruel, callous and laughing sociopaths engaging excitedly in murder. Unfortunately the connecting scenes aren't so good, as the three actors playing the Agents ham it up in a way that is more frustrating than enjoyable - one is a gluttonous snob, another a timid and nervous young woman, the third a hard-nosed working class thug. If each character had been given their own episode to shine, to tell their side of the story across three episodes and then have the fourth reveal the truth, this could have been quite an interesting experiment. Instead everything is so rushed and forced that it loses all impact, and in a little over twenty minutes three alternate takes on the story have been revealed, discarded, and the truth reached. The Doctor reveals himself, he and Peri having orchestrated everything, and the episode ends on a comedic note as the Doctor reveals he was only able to pull off his scheme by "volunteering" Peri to continue on as a waitress at the restaurant for another week. Continuing the "virus" theme from the previous one-off story, this episode doesn't quite pull off the gimmick as effectively as the previous, but its biggest problem is that it is a story that would have possibly worked much better in the traditional "classic" format of four 22 minute episodes.
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Apr 22, 2015 05:25
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I wish people wouldn't focus so much on the letter grades, because he lays out very lengthy observations that explains why he feels the way he does about a particular episode, what worked for him, what didn't, how that comes together overall for the story (and the season as a whole once he's finished the lot) and then he slaps on a grade at the end of it and people seem to just latch onto whatever that is . For me, Night Terrors really IS a pretty good episode, it's just not particularly flashy or what you would call a super-integral/"important" episode - it's just a standard episode of Doctor Who delivered competently with above average visuals that aid the creepy atmosphere, and a very positive moral lesson attached to the end. It has problems for sure, but it's not got any aggressively bad elements to it like other stories do, and if this was as bad as a Who episode ever got, I'd count myself lucky.
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Apr 22, 2015 10:50
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Wheat Loaf posted:"Night Terrors" wasn't bad, but it doesn't stand out for me as much in retrospect. I think "The God Complex" is my favourite episode from the back half of season six. God Complex and The Girl Who Waited are both absolutely amazing episodes, amongst the best of the entire revival, and I feel like they get overlooked a bit because they're in season 6 which was overall such an uneven mess.
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Apr 22, 2015 22:56
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I think that's fair, though I'd say that the first half of season 8 was predominantly the Doctor's character arc, and while that continued through the back half too, the latter part was more devoted to Clara's character arc (though the Doctor felt complicit in that).
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Apr 22, 2015 23:48
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MikeJF posted:Rory's desire to leave in God Complex Haha, I always forget that the hotel in that episode traps everybody in a never-ending maze and confronts them with their greatest fear, but with Rory it just goes,"gently caress it, here's the exit, please leave because I can't do anything that would even give you pause."
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Apr 23, 2015 22:00
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The_Doctor posted:they'd be straight historicals. The timeline was all hosed up due to the contracting nature of the "universe", so it would be a straight alt-historical! The Last Centurion in.... Patton's Last Stand Against the Mongol Hordes
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Apr 24, 2015 05:32
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Angela Christine posted:That sounds more like the time River messed up Time by refusing to kill the (fake) Doctor at the fixed point, so everything was happening all at once. It's done far more subtly (which applies broadly to season 5 against 6 anyway), but in The Big Bang the museum is filled with exhibits with little signs explaining how they've found things/animals/structures etc in places where they should not be - something like penguins living in a desert etc. The idea was to reinforce the notion that the Earth was falling apart and nothing was making sense anymore (at one point if I recall it cuts from day to night in the blink of an eye - the TARDIS is struggling to hold time and space together in a shell around the earth and things clearly aren't going well), and people were struggling to understand because the world they lived in was still supposed to follow certain rules but it wasn't anymore. In The Wedding of River Song, that's taken to a more in-your-face extreme with all time happening at once and everybody in the world just kind of rolling with it because it's the only reality they can remember. In season 5, people know the way things are supposed to be, and are trying to understand why they're not that way.
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Apr 24, 2015 06:22
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Dabir posted:They don't remember stars though. They know what the concept of stars is though, they just don't think they're real, and that Little Amelia's insistence that they are is a sign of a troubled mind. There are a lot of weird contradictions going on in that world, which is only to be expected since time and space is collapsing all around them and everything is compressing together to try and fill up the spaces made by the cracks.
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Apr 24, 2015 09:36
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CobiWann posted:Also, it's the weekend so you know what that means! 
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Apr 24, 2015 10:54
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The_Doctor posted:There's one big mythological story about 2000 years ago I can think of. Was this an atheist universe? The Bible also talks about various prophets living for hundreds of years, I assume religious people just figured "the wise men followed a star in the sky" meant,"The wise men followed a light put in the sky for a few nights by God"
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Apr 24, 2015 15:19
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Chairman Mao posted:Ghost Light Please do, all this talk has got me thinking about watching it again, and I'd like to see what I miss!
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Apr 25, 2015 13:24
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Fil5000 posted:I seem to have misplaced the Eric Saward/Ian Levine comic again. Could anyone repost it? 
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Apr 26, 2015 00:28
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Whenever I read "UNIT Dating" I think of the Doctor and the Brigadier going out to a cabaret and having to sit through a bad comedian and then a belly dancer Brig: Very fit, that girl. Extraordinary muscular control. Must adapt some of those movements as exercises for the men. Doctor: They'd take some adapting!
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Apr 26, 2015 01:13
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 The Wishing Beast suffers the same problem the other three episode format stories have so far, with one crucial difference. This time the "extra" single episode story - The Vanity Box - is explicitly tied into the 3-parter, offering further background information that was sorely needed and serving to wrap things up narratively, if not quite satisfyingly. It's a sign that Big Finish was getting to grips with the format, and it's interesting to hear comments by Briggs on another audio's CD Extras where he lays out his reasoning for moving to 3 episodes and the challenges that brought about. Unfortunately THIS story suffers from feeling like an afterthought, a throwing together of scraps of different stories that was put together to fill in a gap in the schedule - the story is threadbare, there are few characters and despite being an audio it manages to come across like a cheap episode of the show making the best it can out a tiny set design budget. The Sixth Doctor and Mel are traveling through the vortex when they pick up an odd message coming from a small asteroid. An initial scan warns of dangerously high radiation and no signs of life, but then suddenly the radiation vanishes, lifesigns show up, and a clearer message comes through from two elderly women warmly inviting them to come pay a visit. Everything about it should be setting off alarm bells for somebody as widely traveled as the Doctor, but he decides to land anyway and see what is going on, which is an act of apparent oblivious recklessness above and beyond even what you'd expect from the Doctor at his most flippant. The whole setting, and sadly much of the story, feels to me like an episode of early Star Trek where they landed on a mysterious desert planet populated by only a tiny number of humans, one or more of whom had developed some kind of superpower. As they walk through the forest towards the home of the two old women, they are spooked by what appears to be a ghost (even though the Doctor insists there is no such thing) and they end up making a run for it, reaching the "safety" of the sisters' house, where it quickly becomes apparent they're out of the frying pan and into the fire. The sisters Eliza and Maria are played by Geraldine Newman and Jean Marsh respectively. Jean Marsh should be familiar for her long career, including appearances in the Classic series of Who, and she certainly seems enthusiastic about her role as Maria, happily chewing the scenery as the script dictates. Newman does what she can but she has a lesser role and less chance to shine, mostly due to an over-reliance by the script on her "powers". The two sisters basically play as two crazy old witches from straight out of a fairy-tale, and indeed that is what The Wishing Beast essentially is, a fairy tale that happens to have the Doctor and Mel walk directly onto its pages. Sadly it's not a particularly good fairytale, and while the scenery-chewing is a lot of fun, there is almost zero attempt to cover up the madness and sinister intentions of the sisters from either the audience or the Doctor/Mel, who seem to be largely ignorant of what is going on until explicitly told so by other characters (or the sisters themselves). Any script will unfold to tell the story it desires, but a good script will make it feel natural - here the characters act the way they do only because the script calls for them to do so, and here that requires the Doctor and Mel to mostly be idiots with apparently no awareness of the obvious. To be fair, the Doctor does go investigating to learn more about the planet, but it feels more like he's lightly bemused by the sisters' not being entirely forthcoming about answering his questions, as opposed to a desire to uncover what their intentions are. Mel, meanwhile, just kind of seems to blindly go along with everything happening, though she shares some chuckles with the Doctor about how mad the sisters are, she never seems to quite grasp how openly dangerous they are, or how they are clearly intending her harm. Bonnie Langford does just fine with the material as written, it's just that the material for her simply isn't very good. The sisters practically leer and go BWAHAHA every time they tell her that intend to grant her wish and she just kind of (sounds like she) sits there smiling blankly and not grasping that something's not right. When they do finally reveal they have bad intentions, they practically have to smash her over the head with the fact before it finally seems to dawn on her that hey..... HEY THESE GUYS ARE BAD GUYS!  While cheerfully exploring in the forest (which he ran away from in fright no so long ago) he meets the "ghosts" that inhabit the place, where he just as firmly insists that they simply cannot exist. The story feels unsure how to progress with these "ghosts", going out of its way to acknowledge that they're not truly dead and this is more a matter of their physical selves being slowly chipped away leaving nothing but a psychic essence... but then frequently refers to them as spirits in search of peace or being tormented in a horribly purgatory. Similarly with the Wishing Beast itself, the urge seems to be to acknowledge it is NOT a supernatural force, but it is for all intents and purposes a demon, just one with the label of "being from another reality" slapped over the top of it. Doctor Who has a history with beings of cosmic power, but the way this is handled just further serves to make this story feel like a rejected Star Trek: TOS story with a find/replace run to change Captain Kirk to the Doctor, and Enterprise to TARDIS. There's also an utterly embarrassing piece where the sisters deal with ghostly incursions by pulling out.... their vacuum cleaner. Hooked up with a powerful device, it is able to somehow break down what limited physical presence the "ghosts" still retain, but it creates a ludicrous mental image of two batty old women running around menacing some whinging ghosts with a hoover - hilarious, true, but the atmosphere of this story seems to want to go more towards fairytale horror than over-the-top comedy. The Wishing Beast is referred to as "brother" by the sisters, and as with everything they saw this turns out to be a half-truth. The Wishing Beast is a combination of two beings, one of which is the long suffering Daniel, merely a child at the time the ship carrying he and his sisters crashed on the asteroid. The only survivors, he grew to hate them as they grew progressively madder, and a voice spoke to him in the dark offering him his greatest wish - to be a mighty beast that everybody feared, instead of a scared little boy dominated by his sisters. Despite being a grown man, Daniel still has very much a child's mind, and comes across as sullen, sulky, and quick to blame everybody but himself. The three-episode-structure and his own late introduction mean that his character development suffers, as he rushes from this state to one of seeking to help the Doctor - though to be fair even this seemingly selfless decision comes across more as turning his sulky, self-hating behavior against different victims to the ones who have suffered for centuries on the asteroid. With the Wishing Beast defeated if not destroyed, the Doctor takes the oddly detached point of view that they should just leave, because without the sisters or Daniel there to attract passersby, it will simply sit marooned on the asteroid, abandoned and powerless forever. It's a weirdly passive "solution" for the Doctor, a problem somewhat compounded by what follows. The Vanity Box follows almost directly on from the events of this story, with the Doctor promising to take Mel somewhere more fun than a radioactive asteroid in the middle of nowhere. He figures London in the 1960s will be "fabulous" enough, but manages to land in Salford instead, which is hardly glamorous. Faced with this conundrum, he decides to go to the pub and have a drink (a more and more common feature of Big Finish audios featuring the Sixth Doctor!) where he is intrigued to hear about the new owner of the beauty salon, who has managed to perform "miracles" by seemingly taking decades of age from the dowdy Northern housewives. His attempts to investigate are quickly rebuffed, which leads to him getting dressed up in drag and putting on an atrocious Northern accent (I couldn't help but think about Christopher Eccleston's recent interview noting how the Northern accent is given a comedic or "lowly" association in television) in order to get in a closer look at the mysterious Vanity Box that the salon owner reserves for special treatments. Getting a far closer look than is good for him, he discovers the origin of the Vanity Box and discovers the connection to the Wishing Beast, which eventually leads to his figuring out most of the unanswered questions from that story. Everything wraps up in a neat little bow, and the effects of the treatment are reversed.... though the story basically relies on our prior knowledge because as far as I can remember no negative consequences to the beauty treatments are ever indicated in the actual story itself - as far as the inhabitants of Salford know, the salon owner was working legitimate miracles, and the salon owner himself was innocent of any wrongdoing apart from his awful attempt at a French accent. In the CD Extras, it is mentioned that the years taken off the age of the women are also taken from their lives (so the results switching back at the end would indicate those years were returned) but if that was ever noted anywhere in the story itself, I didn't notice it. The Wishing Beast has the same pacing issues as other three-episode-stories, but makes an attempt to ease these issues by making the standalone episode an integral (if external) part of the story. I can't help but wonder why, if that was necessary, they didn't just do a four episode story in the first place and give it more time to breathe. The CD Extras on Frozen Time make mention of the issues Big Finish was having with fitting in with the 22-25 minute limitations of single episodes, as well as the pacing of a 4 episode format as opposed to the more streamlined Revival series format, and their fears about scaring away potential new viewers without alienating the classic fans who supported them from day one. That makes Briggs' insistence that they won't even shift to that single episode format themselves kinda funny, since around the same time they were working out the new 8th Doctor Adventures format with Paul McGann. But it also goes some way towards explaining to me why they experimented with the three episode format, and I think the willingness to experiment with the format they used should be applauded, along with the insistence that they would try not to let this come at the cost of the stories they were trying to tell. Whether 3 or 4 episodes though, I can't imagine that THIS story wouldn't have been disappointing, because the cheap feeling, the ludicrous characters and "props", and the odd behavior of the Doctor and Mel make it notable only for its negatives, while its positives are hard to identify.
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Apr 26, 2015 08:48
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Yes, the decision not to show it was one of the better decisions they've ever made, and revealing it in Time of the Doctor did exactly what I always feared it would, suck the air out of it because what was revealed could never match up to each person's individual take on what it might have been. I actually second-guessed even posting in that thread that I really liked how they handled it in the actual episode, because I didn't want it to come across as being "clever" about the eventual reveal a year+ later.
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Apr 26, 2015 13:34
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Yeah I really disliked that take, but it goes to show how much stronger it was leaving it unrevealed. For Smith, that really was the most horrible thing he could think for the Doctor, and each of us in turn had our own idea of what his fear might be, and all of us were free to project that until Moffat explicitly revealed it was the crack, which for me (and many others) fell flat because it simply didn't compare to what we had in our own heads.
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Apr 26, 2015 13:44
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CobiWann posted:See, I loved that. How many Doctors actually looked forward to their regeneration*? A man dies, and experiences all the pain and suffering, but that same man lives with all those memories. Kind of dark... Though he wasn't exactly looking forward to it, the 9th Doctor was somewhat unique in that he immediately accepted his death and joked around about what it meant was coming. Sure most of that may have been for Rose's benefit, but I got the idea that having had the chance and rejecting a repeat of what he THOUGHT he did in the Time War, he was at peace with the life he had lead and was not at all upset that he was going to get a fresh start. The only really comparable one would be the Third Doctor, I guess, whose last story was all about his fear of death and change and how, with the help of his old mentor, he was able to come to terms with that and die in peace.
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Apr 26, 2015 23:25
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CobiWann posted:...or it was all a long-term plot by the Master! Doctor: And.... and what was the ultimate end-goal of this bizarre, convoluted and nonsensical plan? Master: Iunno? 
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Apr 27, 2015 00:48
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It's a solid story and it does have that "last season of McCoy" feel to it, but it's let down by the resolution sadly. It's also not exactly a pleasant story to listen to, especially with the Doctor playing along for most of the story as just as dark and callous as the people he's come to stand in judgment of. With some reworking of the ending though, I could see this being a top-notch story, and it absolutely would have made for a great episode of the show - I can practically see the sets in my head.
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Apr 28, 2015 22:57
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